Solanaceae
Hyoscyamus niger
Henbane · Stinking nightshade
- Part used
- leafseed
- Native range
- Europe, north Africa and western Asia; naturalised in North America and Australia
- Morphology
- A sticky, hairy, foul-smelling annual or biennial to about eighty centimetres, with coarsely toothed leaves and pale yellow funnel flowers netted with lurid purple veins.
What is in it
Evidence
No controlled evidence for the plant. Its alkaloids are shared with belladonna and are used as isolated drugs.
Safety
Severe anticholinergic poisoning with delirium and hallucination, tachycardia, hyperthermia and seizure. Deaths recorded, including from mistaking the root for parsnip or the leaves for an edible green. Content varies unpredictably.
Interactions: Additive with all anticholinergic drugs
Regulatory: Not a permitted listed-medicine ingredient.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Used as an anaesthetic and sedative from antiquity, in the medieval soporific sponge, and as a poison. Strongly associated with witchcraft in early modern Europe, and one of the plants named in flying-ointment accounts.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
What it is taken for, and who says so
Not sold as a herbal remedy. Its alkaloids are pharmaceutical, and the plant appears here for its history rather than any current market.
Recorded because it is what people believe, not because it is what the plant does. Whether any of it holds up is the Evidence section above, and the two frequently disagree. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the plant doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Worth knowing
Henbane is central to the most persistent claim about European witchcraft — that the flying ointment was a real preparation of tropane-alkaloid plants absorbed through the skin, and that the sensation of flight was a genuine pharmacological effect rather than a confession extracted under torture.
The pharmacology is plausible. Tropane alkaloids do cross skin in a fatty base, and they do produce vivid delirium including sensations of movement and flight. Several early modern writers describe the recipe, and a handful of modern researchers have tried it and reported exactly that.
What is much weaker is the leap from "this could work" to "this is what the accused were doing". The ointment recipes come almost entirely from the demonologists rather than from the accused, which makes them evidence about what the prosecutors believed.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.